Help, I have no idea what I'm doing

Hey there all. I'm a newbie here so bear with me if you can. I'm a musician, I have alot of cool studio gear which, thankfully, I know how to use. However, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing when it comes to sound-proofing, isolation and room acoustics for miking. I'm going to be moving to a new place and the new studio room will be located in a garage which we have already modded to somewhat living standards. The problem is that this is probably going to be a temporary move, only for about 6-10 months(long story,) then we are going to be selling this house, so I can't do any crazy, super-duper studio construction involving permanent changes to the room. Obviously, there is going to be alot of noise in this room, especially with a garage door! It's not the neighbors I'm concerned with as that is not an issue, it's miking vocals and acoustic instruments without background noise and having to gate the crap out of every track. I'm also on a tight budget right now, which makes things even more difficult. I figured that the only way I can isolate noise is by building a small vocal/instrument booth. I can fit a booth about 5' X 3' which should be big enough to record vocals and acoustic guitars. There are two issues which I need to clarify. 1)The muddyness factor. Will the audio sound boxed up and muddy? 2)If not, what materials and what kind of design? (not too expensive either.) My original plan was to build the booth with just one 1" layer of plywood all around covered by something light like commercial carpet on the outside and acoustic foam on the entire interior. And maybe a plexiglass window or two. I know that plan seems pretty amatuerish and stupid. But I really don't know what I'm doing. Please enlighten me. I don't want to waste the time and money if this booth wont work or if it'll sound terrible. On the other hand, if the booth isn't the way to go, I have to do SOMETHING! I can't just take a break from producing for 6-10 months. I'll attach a pic of the proposed booth that I drew up on MS Paint(funny, I know.) Thanks for reading this long, boring post. Hope you can help.

This has been suggested elsewhere: http://www.whisperroom.com/ At one point, I myself was considering just buying one of these things.... Now, this is NOT really a cheap solution (see the prices) for the amount of space you get, and I have no real idea how good these booths are either... Could be worth investigation... I may, at some point in time, look into these if my studio-room doesn't do what I want, or if I need an isolation booth that I would want to be movable... good luck, and hope that you followed all the 'stickies' pre-requisites -- otherwise you risk getting no response (especially from all those members who are 'good' with the subject) or perhaps even getting posts deleted... K

To steal from one of my older posts - I file away (in my head) catchy little phrases all the time, to be later re-gurgitated as I see fit - the one that comes to mind here is "Good, Fast, Cheap - pick any TWO - you can NEVER have all THREE..." Where this applies is that decent sound isolation takes serious thought and quite a bit of mass - the more mass, the less portable. I've looked at the specs on the Whisperroom's and am NOT impressed - not that I could do better, it's just that "portable" and "soundproof" don't belong in the same sentence, essentially - neither does "temporary"... Now, if you can build your booth so it's basic dimensions are 3x5x6.5 feet inside, that will be about the best modal distribution you can get in that size booth. Muddiness shouldn't be a problem if you don't just foam the whole inside - Instead, you should start out with two adjacent walls covered from about midpoint up to the ceiling in 2 or 3" 3 PCF mineral or glass wool (Owens Corning 703 or equivalent) and another piece suspended at a slight angle from the ceiling. You can add more absorbent if that's too "live" - mic placement will also affect the sound; experiment here til you find what works. Placing one or more of the insulation batts across a corner diagonally can also help the sound quite a bit. As far as actual isolation goes, all the basics talked about in the REFERENCE section apply the same to booths as to other rooms, and a floor or ceiling or window or door is no different than a wall when it comes to mass-air-mass effectiveness. IF you have a lot of LOW frequency rumble coming in from the street, good luck; one way around that is to filter out any LF you don't need in the recording, this will help on vox tracks and a little on acoustic guitar. I use Samplitude, and have had fair luck killing noise with it's built in noise reduction algorithm with minimal artifacts - in most cases, can't even tell it was done. Gotta run, HTH... Steve

knightfly wrote:

Instead, you should start out with two adjacent walls covered from about midpoint up to the ceiling in 2 or 3" 3 PCF mineral or glass wool (Owens Corning 703 or equivalent) and another piece suspended at a slight angle from the ceiling.

Thanks for the advice! Now as far as the PCF mineral or glass wool, do I need to cover it up or just place it naked on the wall? I know I'm sounding pretty stupid again but isn't that stuff unhealthy to breath? Also, the piece that I should suspend at a slight angle from the ceiling, what do you mean by suspend? shouldn't it be attached to the ceiling? And as far as a slight angle, should I build the ceiling in an angle as well? Sorry but I really don't know what I'm doing. Thanks so much.

PCF stands for Pounds per Cubic Foot, and 3 PCF is the density of the material - it works by all the little fibers inside trying to slow down the air movement, which converts some of the sound energy into heat. You can (and should) cover this with cloth, but everything you use needs to be able to pass air or it won't work the same. The angled ceiling pieces should be suspended (there are several methods of doing this, such as lightweight metal angle http://www.recording.org/ftopict-26889.html and more involved/aesthetic ways http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewt ... 1&start=90 In a booth, the first should work fine. The idea here is to increase the distance from the FACE of the absorbent to the solid surface behind it, so it absorbs sound to a lower frequency - this makes the sound more balanced inside. As to danger, (from the REFERENCE section in this forum, which you need to check again :wink: http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1742 YOu can also get more on acoustics at (you guessed it) the Acoustics forum - browsing thru all the stuff here will (1) answer at least a few of your questions, and (b) cause you to ask a lot more, both of which will lead to a combination of enlightenment and confusion :? (not necessarily in that order :wink: ) - but anything that makes us think also helps us grow (That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it :wink: ) Steve